Systems providing services such as, for example, cloud services, often employ hundreds of thousands of servers to provide those services. Many servers are used for specific types of workloads or tasks. Depending on the tasks, power performance tradeoffs may exist. These systems include High Performance Computing (HPC) servers, cloud front and back-end servers, storage servers, communication servers, etc.
Server node density is increasing dramatically now and in the foreseeable future. In many designs, multiple nodes share common power supplies and are placed on one blade. Managing power for such nodes and blade servers is a key factor that affects nodes density and cost.
A number of power management technologies have been presented for such systems. For example, one traditional method for performing power management for server node or cluster arrangements is using a baseboard management controller (BMC). BMCs take up significant area on a server board—roughly 3 square inches per node board. Thus, using a BMC reduces the node board density since it increases the board area to make room for the BMC.
In another approach, a server rack uses a chassis manager to perform power management. In this case, such a chassis manager is either a dedicated node or a separate chassis management system, which complicates the rack level management system. This means either performance is compromised by losing space for nodes to accommodate this added management system or there are additional costs associated with its inclusion.
Both solutions discussed above involving the use of a BMC or a chassis manager is problematic to server suppliers. The server suppliers do not like the high cost of the BMC and chassis manager functional validation, as well as the additional validation efforts.